November 14, 2014 — In this session, Kathy Cano-Murillo, the Crafty Chica, shares how she took her knowledge and experience from being a newspaper features reporter and applied it to create her award-winning blog, CraftyChica.com. She also shares her comical-yet-insightful lessons learned, as well as her insider tips that elevated her blog to a lifestyle site that spun off a series of books, a product line, web series, brand partnering and more. She shares her best practices for pinpointing a mission statement, and creating engaging content to support that. While Kathy‘s blog is grounded in DIY, she shares how she takes liberty with that “creativity” theme and applies to food, shopping, diary, entertainment, books and more.

November 14, 2014 — Finding your blog’s voice isn’t as simple being honest, honoring the audience’s interests, and crafting the best tone and structure for a story; except that maybe it is. Trace the evolution of my blogging voice through personal and professional blogs, group blogs, corporate blog ghostwriting, and blog awards. Hear stories of how writing and design choices, gaffes, and observations become blog voice. Because, in the end, finding your blog’s voice is about both a journey and a destination.

November 14, 2014 — Lighting Talks: Blogger Basics
The most important first step to writing for the web is understanding that you will forever be writing to dual audiences. Join Josepha for a look at what to do, and not do, when it comes to optimizing your content for search engines.

November 14, 2014 — Lighting Talks:
Learn how to better use photography on your website in this fast-paced tour of WordPress image tips. Get the most out of the built-in features in WordPress, learn how to select and prepare images for the web, and discover how strong photography can help your website.

November 13, 2014 — Contrary to popular beliefs, blogging is neither dead, nor difficult. But it does require a few strategies to help you know what to write about – as a blank screen can be intimidating. The takeaway from my own story, and the stories of others, will help you feel much more confident about starting or refreshing your blog to drive results.

Presentation Slides »

November 12, 2014 — Some folks call it laziness. I call it efficiency. And I’ve used WordPress for over a decade to make my jobs more efficient – from moving one of the oldest and most popular hyperlocal sites Baristanet.com away from Movable Type, helping incorporate WordPress as a CMS at the NBA, to centralizing my slideshow workflow. I’ll talk about the struggles and breakthroughs I discovered while exploring the flexibility of using WordPress to solve a variety of problems.

November 6, 2014 — You’ve been managing content in WordPress, maybe you’ve dabbled with modifying a file, but you’re not sure where to go from here (other than total failure). In this session we’ll cover how to transition from dabbler to budding developer, learning opportunities around the web, and issues that can impact your learning, ranging from imposter syndrome to gender and generalisms to non-computer science educational backgrounds.

November 5, 2014 — Setting up your WordPress site is just the first step; the next challenge is filling it with useful, helpful, and interesting content that will engage readers and keep them coming back for more. This session will cover pointers from veteran blogger, author, and publisher Peter DeHaan to help beginners minimize frustration and existing bloggers to be more effective in what they write.

Presentation Slides »

November 3, 2014 — As bloggers, the more personal we are, the more popular we are. Yet we often choose to be fact-based and corporate over honest and human on our blogs. We play it safe. And this gets boring. We want to be exciting and fun. After a brief presentation about reasons and ways to blog, the participants create blog posts and discuss how to build reader interest and suspense. Participants write about their own small quiet moments and big public events. This fun workshop inspires bloggers to get creative in their writing and find new ways to write.

Presentation Slides »

November 2, 2014